Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)
by
J.M.Coetzee
Author, Background
°Cape Town. (Dutch-German-Polish ancestors)
Studies literature and mathematics.
PhD (on Samuel Beckett) from Austin, Texas
Taught at Cape Town U, John Hopkins, Harvard.
Marriage: 1963-1980. One son (killed) and one daughter.
Other novels: Dusklands (1974), The Life and Times of Michael K. (1983, Booker Prize
1984), Foe (1986), Disgrace (Booker Prize 1999), Slow Man (2005), The Childhood of
Jesus (2013)
2002: moves to Adelaide, Australia (U of Adelaide)
2003: Nobel prize
2005: Philip Glass composes opera based on Waiting for the Barbarians.
2006: Australian citizen
According to South African writer Rian Malan:
“Coetzee is a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke, or
eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk
each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade
claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties
where Coetzee has uttered not a single word.”
Coetzee’s reaction:
"I have met Rian Malan only once in my life. He does not know me and is not qualified to talk
about my character."
The story
“I am a country magistrate, a responsible official in the service of the Empire, serving out
my days on this lazy frontier, waiting to retire. I collect the tithes and taxes, administer
the communal lands, see that the garrison is provided for, (...) preside over the law-court
twice a week. For the rest I watch the sun rise and set, eat and sleep and am content.
When I pass away I hope to merit three lines of small print in the Imperial gazette. I have
not asked for more than a quiet life in quiet times. -> boy does this go wrong
But last year stories began to reach us from the capital of unrest among the barbarians.
(...) There had been clashes with border patrols. The barbarian tribes were arming, the
rumour went; the Empire should take precautionary measures, for there would certainly
be war.
Of this unrest I myself saw nothing.” (8)
-> tells us what his responsibilities are
The whole novel is in this passage that is to say an empire fabricates stories to legitimize,
justify its policies, its violence and that leads us directly to one of the greatest motives in the
,novel, which Is the function of rumors, how is a rumor different from a lie? The lie once
exposed is false, the lie is a proven untrue say, a rumor may be true may be wrong, it’s far
more complex. When you are faced with a lie you call it out however you were faced with
rumors it’s much more complicated, you create stories as an empire to lock them in a state
of down so that you do not know whether your information is true or false, in a military
conflict the role of rumor is huge (“what if Ukraine was really going to invade Russia”)
Rumors create fear, it incapacitates you, what if it were true, when faced with a constant
barrage of rumors you get politically, mentally, militarily paralyzed, you don’t know what to
do.
Production of rumors is a fantastic weapon of those who control the media, to produce
rumors and to prevent people from unmasking those,
Look at the title “waiting for the barbarians” you create this anxiety, fear which is based on
very little evidence, but just in case it’s true we have to act,
America called precautionary measures the preemptive strike, in order to justify the
preemptive strike, you have to create rumors, and fear, if we do not invade them, they will
inside us,
Historical Background
South Africa. Apartheid.
Stephen Biko (1946-1977)
1972: Black People’s Convention (promoting ‘black consciousness’)
Aug 1977: arrested by the white regime and withing a few weeks he died in a prison cell
Official cause of his death: hunger strike,
Human rights organization demanded scrutiny of the body and discovered that the
corps showed severe brain damage, he had been beaten to death in his prison cell by the
white authorities
Sept 12, 1977: dies in a prison cell in Pretoria
1994: apartheid abolished.
Biko was a huge marter
Themes/Motives:
From Representative (of Empire) to Outsider:
The Power of Rumor:
The Power of Language:
Nameless: the Judge in a frontier settlement; the girl; the Star;
Named: Colonel Joll, Warrant Officer Mandel
Allegorical dimension:
“Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.”
, Walter Benjamin
“It can be argued that all interpretation is allegorical, in that it involves the establishing of
meaning in relation to a pre-existing code. In Waiting for the Barbarians, allegory is thematized
as a means of articulating the liberal humanist crisis of interpretation, while at the same time
allegory is employed as a structural device in order to imply the inevitable imbrication of the
novel’s own discourse with the discourse it deconstructs.”
(Teresa Dovey, in Huggan G. & Watson S. (eds), Critical perspectives on J.M. Coetzee (Macmillan Press,
1996)
The (il)legitimacy of Empire/imperialism: civilization vs barbarism
The Judge & Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902)
The Nobel Prize committee called Waiting for the Barbarians "a political thriller in the tradition
of Joseph Conrad, in which the idealist’s naiveté opens the gates to horror."
-> the opposite of Coetzee, book about white people travelling into the heart of Africa, compared to
waiting for the barbarians because the judge in this book what he describes is really the history of an
and of an illusion, he thought he could represent an empire and be innocent and be a civilized man,
Excerpts (Penguin)
“First I get lies, you see -this is what happens- first lies, then pressure, then more lies,
then more pressure, then the break, then more pressure, then the truth. That is how you
get the truth.” (5)
-> colonel jol about “interrogating” people, you basically beat the truth out of a person, this
is all about Stephen Biko, you can’t read the first twenty pages of the book without thinking
of Stephen Biko.
“Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of a
dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization; and upon this resolution I
based the conduct of my administration.” (38)
-> he thought he could be a decent representative of a decent empire
“‘Would you not like to see your sisters again?’ I ask. The blunder hangs grotesquely in
the air between us. We both smile. ‘Of course,’ she says.” (53)
-> blunder is she is blind, larger meaning of the blunder: in asking this question the judge
opens up a possibility which the empire wants to shut down and that is the recognition of
this woman’s humanity, maybe she is an object but a human being with genuine and human
desires, and then the judge makes the biggest mistake of his life, he says were going to
return this girl to her family, he rides out of his tow himself to reunite this girl with her
family, this is the tragical moment of the ovel because this decision by the judge to return
this woman will inevitably, automatically outsider him, this is the tragic paradox at the heart
of this book, in recognizing the humanity of this woman the judge makes himself into the
outsider/enemy/ victim of the very system he represents (he outlaws himself). Because the
notion of empire lives of the contradiction empire/ barberry you can only have an empire
when some people do not belong to it, every empire needs barbarians if only to oppose, to
